Fire on the mountain

Yesterday there was a fairly small fire in a treacherous place, the Hiller Highlands neighborhood. There was confusion in the media accounts I saw, but here is the correct version, as you can see in this view from across the freeway this morning. The streets, from top to bottom, are Charing Cross Road, Tunnel Road, Caldecott Lane and Route 24. (A typo in the Tribune, “Charring Cross Road,” may give you grim amusement.) The blaze began on Tunnel where street work took place a few months ago, and nearly reached Charing Cross. As I shot this photo, fire crews were still combing the burn area in search of embers.

The hills love fire, and the ecosystem is adapted to it, but civilization here is not. Given that we have irreversibly encroached on the hills by permitting residential construction there, we’re stuck with the price in dollars and lives in perpetuity. Not even the next major earthquake on the Hayward fault, less than a kilometer west, will change this even though the whole neighborhood would likely burn down again, just like 1991, if it happened today.

Yesterday not an hour before the fire started, I was standing on Grizzly Peak Boulevard looking down at this part of town and sensing just how dry everything is. Instead of coming down through here, as I have before, I walked down through the Grandview neighborhood to its north. Upper Grandview is an uncanny place, having been wiped out in the 1991 fire and disneyfied since. Today I was going to visit the fire site, but I got this shot because instead I took the opportunity to try the fire road above Broadway that ends overlooking the North Oakland Regional Sports Center. If you visit the park, have a look at the fire-resistant garden there. The rocks are mapped as undifferentiated Great Valley Sequence and are mostly an undistinguished gray sandstone.